Which way: Femtocells or UMA?
February 1, 2010 by admin
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Discussions are again resurfacing about which technology should be used to improve coverage; Femtocells or UMA. Honestly, I have not been a big supporter of UMA (and you dont have to agree with me) and earlier this year when Nokia raised doubts about the technology, i stopped following it completely. Kineto has been the biggest supporter of UMA and is still carrying the torch.
Kineto recently received over $15 million in investment from Motorola that it plans to use to increase its reach in UMA. Last month it had received investment from NEC. One of the reasons for the resurgence could be because the UMA technology has matured since being used for some time. T-Mobile has already rolled Hotspot @ Home using UMA. Also more phones are now available supporting UMA.
One of the drawbacks that will always be present in case of UMA is that special handsets will be required that would support WiFi as UMA is based on 802.11. This means more expensive phones and higher consumption of power leading to smaller battery lives. One more problem with UMA is the interference due to other ISM band devices and there are many technologies like Bluetooth, etc that are competing for the band.
The drawback in case of Femtocells could be that their price is still quite high as complete Node B + RNC functionality is generally available in a Femtocell and at the same time all the aspects have not yet been standardised. Along with these, Femtocells that use the same spectrum as that of the operator can cause interference with the Macro cell. This would in turn require very clever management of spectrum frequencies, etc.
A possible long term solution could be (but I dont see anyone agreeing to it right now) that phones with UMA technology become more common and a combined UMA + Femtocell equipment is rolled out by the operator. At the end user premises, depending on the strength of rf reception, the equipment can either use UMA or normal Femtocell functionality. If this idea is agreed upon, then there would still be couple of years before all interworking and other technological problems are ironed out.
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Get a Femtocell and make money
January 24, 2010 by admin
Filed under Uncategorized
[#2: Edit Options>MightyAdsense>Adsense Code]
This post again is a concept but I dont see why the operators may not go this way.
The main reason you would put a Femtocell in your house or your shop is because you want cheaper calls and reliable coverage. The Femtocells would probably be setup as Closed Femtocells or better known in 3GPP Release 8 as CSG (closed subscriber groups). It may be beneficial for the operator that the Femtocells are setup as ‘open’ rather than closed. This can be useful in shops or malls where the shoppers can experience bad coverage in particular part of the shop or mall.
To motivate people to keep open access, they could offer free cash to the Femtocell owners on which outsiders (IMSI’s not on the access list) camp and originate voice and data calls. In the web world, similar approach is used by Google Adsense. UK operator ’3′ has also tried similar cashback scheme before with decent success.
This approach may encourage lots of shops and people (especially during Credit Crunch scenario) to install Femtocells thereby increasing coverage significantly.
On the flipside, I should mention that people might start abusing this and increase the interference in the Macro cell. Also, the operators have to plan the Femtocell rollout in such a way that such interferences would be kept to minimum.
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